Chapter Text
Sometimes, Violetta would find herself looking at the wisp of a girl weeping in a corner of the room and wonder whoever could lie to a face like that and say that Dunwall would suit her, or that her soft curves and delicate hands would be useful anywhere but the Cat. To imagine Sabine with her amber locks and doe eyes sorting through whale flesh was almost as painful as imagining the look that would be on Morgan Pendleton’s face when he saw her for the first time.
The other girls would chime cheerfully to Sabine during the few morning ablutions or hasty late-night meals between clients that had passed in the last few days, but the newcomer seemed to be interested in little more than silence. They were lucky if she so much as sniffled, or daintily picked a morsel of food off of someone else’s plate. It didn’t surprise anyone much - the farm girls were usually like this for the first few days, but soon enough Madame Prudence coaxed them into functioning. Each one of them had seen it happen a hundred times before, some to themselves as well.
Sometimes, it was strange to look back and think that this sort of employment had ever been anything but natural.
Not one of the girls ever thought to comment on the irony that they all still lounged in the Ivory Room when there were no guests to use it, in just the same state of dress that they would have worn had there been a Pendleton or a Boyle or a High Overseer in the room with them. Violetta was often of the notion that it was coping, that attaching fond memories in places like this would be escapism at some point, but the real truth of it was that the attic was blazing hot, just like the rest of the building. The cool breeze that carried the sounds of the river and the city was the only refuge, and the feeling of it playfully tugging at her hair was what drew Violetta to drape herself on the windowsill, absorbing the calm of a city lit with the eerie combination of whale oil and moonlight.
It was just Louila and Sabine with her then, the others all off at the fish pond or seeing to some last stragglers yet to stumble out into the street. Sometimes, the sound carried in quiet moments like this, but with Louila’s voice carrying and Marie’s harp a few rooms over, it was nothing unbearable - though few things were truly, deeply unbearable, and Violetta knew all of them by name. She wondered how many Sabine knew.
“Really, you should count yourself lucky,” Louila was speaking casually from her seat on the bed where she had been entertaining the Captain of the City Watch thirty minutes before. Sabine sat beside her, with downcast eyes and the hint of a pout on her pretty lips. “One look at a dying whale and you’d be begging to work here again. You’re safer here, isn’t that right, Violet?”
It was too easy to nod her head, to smile as if she didn’t remember the raw strips of skin still healing around Betty’s wrists, of the angry welts left on Louila’s back after some of the regulars left, of the sight of Magnolia crying for help through the blood trailing from her mouth and eyes.
“Much safer,” Violetta replied, with a soft smile that barely held Sabine’s attention for a second. “Madame Prudence will tell you as much. As would any girl here.”
Louila was about ready to continue with her speech when Helena pushed through the door, her favorite skirt in one hand with a huge tear down the side. Sabine seemed to hardly noticed Louila’s exit, nor her hasty promise to have fruit and sausage sent up, saying they may as well make an occasion of it. The girl hardly shifted when the door shut, leaving only the sound of the wind through the empty halls and the very first beginnings of sunrise that turned the dark sky grey.
It was a long moment of silence, which Violet took to study the woman in front of her fully. Beyond the comely face and the big eyes, there were soft freckles spotting her skin, which was tanned from sunshine beyond a place like Gristol from what she could tell. The robe that someone had the decency to wrap around her covered the plainest of plainclothes, though the way she wore that much made Violetta flush with some semblance of shame for the first time in a while.
Only when Sabine meet her eyes did she realize the amount that she was staring, and her quick glance away did little good. It was her turn to be examined, but the gaze of a silent woman was nothing compared to the hunger and lust in the wandering gaze and the restless hands of the only men she had ever known.
She heard Sabine move before she looked up to see her, and it was with ease that Violetta moved aside to make room for her on the windowsill. It seemed as if hours could have passed in the moment that Violet watched Sabine watch Dunwall, and it was long before the former processed that she was seeing it for perhaps the first time, with the way that the dulled wonderment in her eyes still made the light reflect back tenfold upon her face.
“Where did you come from?” Violet’s voice was soft as she asked, hoping to gently break the silence.
Sabine turned to answer at first, but her gaze turned again outside, across the river, where the faintest outline of a whaling ship could be seen in the distance. “Cullero, in Serkonos.” Her voice was feeble at first, but the lilting cadence of it grew almost amused as she spoke. “This place isn’t what I expected.”
“Dunwall?” Violetta followed her gaze out across the skyline, searching for what it is that was so strange about the only city she herself had ever known.
“The Golden Cat,” Sabine corrected. “I thought all of you would be more… Upset.”
Violetta couldn’t stop the pursing of her lips. “Next to none of us take this job by choice, that much you know, but you learn quickly.” Leaning her head back, she looked back across the room, yet to be cleaned with disheveled sheets and small tokens accidentally forgotten in a rush: a handkerchief, a coin, a sock, a wristwatch. “How to act, how to feign compassion, how to put a pretty face on underneath your rouge and take your mind somewhere different.” With a soft shifting, she examined the soft curve of Sabine’s cheek again, the perceived innocence of all of her, and for the briefest of moments she wanted to hide her away from the reality she would face with the rising of the sun.
Sabine only looked back with those eyes, and when Violetta touched her arm, she just barely leaned into the touch. Her pity for Sabine in that moment overshadowed the last bit of rationale, and as the sun broke over the horizon, she lied to her, sweeter than she ever had to any patron to walk through those doors.
“It isn’t quite unbearable.”